McAfee, part of Intel Security, hosted its 4th annual Partner Summit, providing nearly 700 channel partners from around the globe with the opportunity to engage with McAfee executives and customers.
During this year’s event, McAfee unveiled several channel initiatives to help partners build sustainable security practices.
The company has announced a new partner program framework, including a name change effective January 1 – changing the name of its Security Alliance Program to the Intel Security Partner Program.
McAfee will consolidate from five product competencies to three solution competencies: Endpoint Security, Network Security and Security Management.
“We aim at providing our partners, globally and in the region, with increased flexibility for building profitable and sustainable security practices through a new channel partner program framework that focuses on change and thinking big, ” said Maya Kreidy, Regional Channel Manager, UAE, GCC & Pakistan, McAfee, part of Intel Security. “In order to anticipate our customers’ evolving security needs today and tomorrow, we need to think big.”
McAfee is removing the need for partners to complete Baseline Certifications and is expanding Continuing Education to give all partners the flexibility to earn credits for training that is most relevant to their business.
It has also announced its CloudRunner Platform, which enables partners to access McAfee’s product portfolio via the cloud.
With CloudRunner, partners can build a demo environment in an average of five minutes without the need to have an appliance, box or virtual machine set up in a customer’s environment.
CloudRunner will be available in early November and will include McAfee Next Generation Firewall (NGFW), McAfee Endpoint, and McAfee Network Security Platform (NSP) environments.
Two new channel partner experience announcements were also made. The Partner 360 Dashboard provides partners with analysis of their performance and profitability, providing a view into approximately 10 different business indicators, including sales performance, rebate and marketing development funds.
The platform will be piloted with a select group of North America partners in Q4 2014 with a broader roll out aimed for the first half of 2015.
